Sitting for this portrait prompted the psychologist and economist, Ralph Glasser, to go through a process of deep self-examination. He had felt the same way when writing his autobiographical trilogy, 'Growing up in the Gorbals', 'Gorbals Boy at Oxford' and 'Gorbals Voices, Siren Songs'. Glasser's account of his childhood and adolescence describes the now vanished world of Jewish immigrants in the slums of Glasgow. He started working at fourteen but later won a scholarship to Oxford University, a place where '"someone from the Gorbals was in effect a bushman and the Gorbals itself as distant, as unknowable, as the Kalahari Desert".